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A good companion article to read is "Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved" [1], written about a year ago by the guy who founded The Verge before he launched Th

A good companion article to read is "Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved" [1], written about a year ago by the guy who founded The Verge before he launched The Outline. The basic argument is that these media companies are chasing readership scale (via Facebook exposure, etc) as a way to solve the problem that no one actually values what they produce very much. And that they keep chasing the next "tech thing" as a solution to get more readership scale instead of just producing good content for an audience that actually cares about them. It's a very cathartic read if you are jaded about the current online media world. [1] https://medium.com/@joshuatopolsky/your-media-business-will-not-be-saved-1b0716b5010c https://medium.com/@joshuatopolsky/your-media-business-will-...

shostack 9y ago
What is fascinating is to see FB successfully employ the same general strategy to publishers as they did advertisers. With advertisers, they got everyone excited about the ability to reach their audience through a new channel. It had some similarities to email in that FB encouraged you to get Likes on your page, and then everything you posted would in theory reach your audience. Then they gradually tightened the screws in the name of declining user experience with too much garbage in the feed, which became algorithmic instead of sorted by recency. This in turn let them flip the switch and move to basically zero reach unless you pay. And not just pay a flat rate based on however thousands of users you have (like email providers), but a dynamic pricing auction that maximizes revenue for FB. So advertisers invested all this time and major dollars on building their FB base, without actually owning the contact info or the ability to reach those people without paying FB. Frog successfully boiled. Now with publishers they got them all excited about the reach they get for their content, and then slowly choke them via Instant Articles. Since publishers are so reliant on the revenue from FB, they have ZERO leverage in these negotiations, much like when Google says "sure, you don't have to have your content indexed." FB can now decide how benevolent it is feeling towards publishers, and there's nothing they can do about it.
exolymph 9y ago
The irony is that The Outline is just like all the others, except that it has prettier ads.

shostack 9y ago

What is fascinating is to see FB successfully employ the same general strategy to publishers as they did advertisers. With advertisers, they got everyone excited about the ability to reach their audience through a new channel. It had some similarities to email in that FB encouraged you to get Likes on your page, and then everything you posted would in theory reach your audience. Then they gradually tightened the screws in the name of declining user experience with too much garbage in the feed, which became algorithmic instead of sorted by recency. This in turn let them flip the switch and move to basically zero reach unless you pay. And not just pay a flat rate based on however thousands of users you have (like email providers), but a dynamic pricing auction that maximizes revenue for FB. So advertisers invested all this time and major dollars on building their FB base, without actually owning the contact info or the ability to reach those people without paying FB. Frog successfully boiled. Now with publishers they got them all excited about the reach they get for their content, and then slowly choke them via Instant Articles. Since publishers are so reliant on the revenue from FB, they have ZERO leverage in these negotiations, much like when Google says "sure, you don't have to have your content indexed." FB can now decide how benevolent it is feeling towards publishers, and there's nothing they can do about it.

exolymph 9y ago

The irony is that The Outline is just like all the others, except that it has prettier ads.